


Forget that I rang you...

by sowell



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:11:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sowell/pseuds/sowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years out of Neptune, and everyone's moving on except Veronica.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget that I rang you...

**Author's Note:**

> 1) So, so, so, so much love to nessaassen and leucocrystal for their incredibly insightful and thorough beta work. They cleaned up my mess and made it readable - they are awesome. Also, thank you to everyone else on my flist who offered. It was really very appreciated. 2) Be warned - this fic may or may not contain hints of my EXTREME FRUSTRATION with Logan and Veronica this season. Just saying. 3) Title is lifted from, of course, Francis Dunnery's "Good Life."

It’s funny how everything tends to happen at once. You can go for years without incident, without tragedy or upheaval, and you think,  _finally_ , that your life might be on track. And then everything comes down on you in one massive shit storm.

Your boyfriend of two years cheats on you. You get fired for something that wasn’t even close to your fault. And you learn one of your parents is dying.

“I think you should come home,” her father said quietly, over the phone on a rainy Tuesday night. Tuesday. She’d just received supposedly earth-shattering news, and all she could think was,  _Five more fucking days until this week is over._

“Veronica?” he said. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard you,” she managed, and her voice sounded colder than she meant it to. “And I’m moving on and pretending you never said it. How’s the weather over there?”

He sighed into the phone, and she could almost see him rubbing a hand over his bald head. Tears stung her eyes, and she had a sudden, fierce urge to see her father, to be there to feel his arms around her. But not if it meant she had to see Lianne at the same time.

“I know she hasn’t been much of a mother to you,” he said softly.

“Then why even ask me to come?” she practically cried. She could feel her own voice catching in her throat, and she knew without a doubt her father could hear it as well. “What’s the point?”

“For you,” he said simply. “I don’t want you to wake up in ten years and realize you regret it. You should have the chance to say goodbye.”

~

Her father was there to meet her at the airport two days later. It was a long flight from New York City to Neptune, but she would have gladly sat on that plane for three days straight if it meant she never had to see her mother again. But her dad seemed hell bent on closure, and he’d always had the ability to make her see things from his point of view.

She burst into tears the minute she saw him.

He was half-laughing as he embraced her, grabbing her bag with his free hand. “Honey, honey, calm down. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“I’m just really happy to see you,” she choked out, wiping snot on his shoulder.

“You’d think  _I_  was the one dying,” he half-joked, half-chided, giving her another squeeze.

“Stop it,” she said fiercely. “That’s not funny. This has nothing to do with her.” The tears were coming faster than she could wipe them away. It was a good thing blotchy faces were a dime a dozen in the airport, or else she’d be causing a major scene.

“I know,” her father whispered, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Let’s go home. Alicia’s making dinner for us.”

~

Alicia cooked, and her father did the dishes. Apparently that was the daily routine in the Mars-Fennel household. Wallace had long since moved out of Neptune with his wife, but he had promised to call the next day to catch up, or so her father told her as they stood side-by-side at the kitchen sink, washing and drying.

“I’ve been visiting your mom since she went in the hospital the last time,” her father said, not looking up from the salad bowl he was currently wiping down.

She scrubbed a little harder at the spaghetti sauce-stained dinner plate. “Alicia must love that,” she said, but her voice wasn’t obeying. The comment was supposed to sound smooth and nonchalant; instead it sounded like her vocal chords had snagged on a broken bottle.

“She understands,” her father said vaguely, somehow effortlessly achieving the exact tone she’d been striving for.

“Then she must know something I don’t,” Veronica said shortly. “Because I still have no idea why I’m here.” Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she knew that if she didn’t stop scrubbing, the painted flowers were going to start chipping off the porcelain, but she couldn’t seem to still her hands.

“And I’ve been helping pay for her treatment,” he continued casually. The plate slipped out of her grip and into the sink, sending up a volcano of soapy water into her face. She barely noticed.

“You what?” she whispered. “Why would you do that? You and Alicia barely have enough to retire as it is. What on earth would make you think –” She stopped for a sputtering second, well aware that her voice was rising. “You don’t  _owe_  her anything!” she exploded.

Her father was watching her sadly. “I think we’re past who owes who, at this point,” he said quietly, and Veronica got the sickening feeling that he was disappointed in her. “She’s your mother.”

“She’s not!” She wiped furiously at the tears starting to slide out of her eyes again. There was a horrible band stretching inside of her, right through the center of her stomach like taffy pulling. She wished to God it would just snap. Anything was better than this horrible emptiness, this not knowing.

“She wants to see you,” he added.

“Good,” she said, as coldly as she could muster. Which wasn’t very, considering how muffled with tears her voice was. “Now she knows how I felt when she left in the middle of the night when I was sixteen years old.”

Her father was shaking his head. “You’re an adult,” he said, and for the first time he sounded defeated. “I won’t tell you what to do.” He looked up at her with a small smile. “You never listened anyway.”

She picked up the dish and sponge again, and she felt his hand on her wrist.

“Please think about it,” he said. “For me.”

~

“What’s this I hear about you getting fired?” Wallace asked over the phone. “You call your boss a jackass, or something?”

“It’s nice to hear you have such faith in me,” she said dryly.

“I mean it,” he said seriously. “What happened?”

“Oh, you know,” she said glibly. “Same old story. Journalist’s editor gives her a tip on a source. Journalist writes story; source turns out to be unreliable. Editor denies all knowledge; journalist takes the fall.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Journalist has to find new career, since she’s now on the shit list of every publication in New York.”

Wallace was silent for a minute. Then he said, “Want me to go kick his ass?”

She gave her best attempt at a laugh. “I’ll take it under consideration.”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about your mom.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I seem to be on everyone’s shit list lately. Including God’s.”

“Nah,” he replied. “You just never learned to trust the right people, that’s all.”

“Great,” she said sourly. “I take it you’re not including yourself in that little assessment.”

“Of course not,” he said genially.

“My dad wants me to go see her,” she confessed.

“Your dad’s a smart guy,” he said blandly. “You going to do it?”

She didn’t answer, and she could almost see him smiling through the phone.

~

It was one thing to cut your cheating, abandoning, thieving, alcoholic mother out of your life when she had freshly escaped with $50,000 of your family’s hard-earned money. It was another when she was lying in a blue-lit hospital room, sunken, defeated, and so thin she barely made a bump under the woven blanket.

“It’s so good to see you,” Lianne said, when Veronica was seated in the chair by the bed. The ravages of chemotherapy had left her almost unrecognizable, and her voice was so weak that Veronica had to lean closer to hear her over the humming of the machines keeping her alive.

“Dad said you were asking for me,” she said stiffly. “Here I am.”

“Here you are,” her mother said, with a note of such tenderness that Veronica almost got up and walked out right then.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, as civilly as she could manage.

“It’s not too bad today,” Lianne sighed. “It comes and goes.” Veronica wanted to scream in the muffled silence of the room, but her vocal chords were as locked up as the rest of her body.

“But I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you,” her mother said, her voice brightening a fraction. “Tell me. Your father says you work at a paper?” She still sounded entirely too weak, and Veronica felt infuriating pity start to creep in, to soften her.

“Look, I’m not – I’m not here to…do whatever,” Veronica said suddenly. “Talk about old times. Cry.”

“Sweetheart, I didn’t expect you to,” her mother answered, tired and utterly unsurprised.

“Then what?” she asked sharply. “What could we possibly have to say to each other right now?”

“I know you can’t forgive me,” her mother said, barely audible under all that sorrow and regret. “All I want is to talk to you. You’re my daughter, like it or not. This is my last chance.”

It was amazing how all the emotions could hit you at once. The sorrow and the fury and the fear and horrible inevitability. It all welled up in her at the same time; choking her, cutting off everything except that terrible, keening pressure in her chest. When her vision finally cleared, her mother was still looking at her, expectant and pleading and maybe a little frightened.

“You missed your last chance a long time ago,” Veronica said, and walked out the door.

~

She made it through an entire week before she ran into Logan. Alicia and her father were doing their best to coddle her through every second of this visit, but Veronica could only take so much walking on eggshells before she went insane. When Alicia absently mentioned she needed more strawberry soy yogurt, Veronica had the keys to her father’s car in hand and one foot out the door before Alicia even had time to stutter out the brand name.

Twenty minutes later, she was regretting it. There had to be thirty different types of yogurt in all colors, shapes, and sizes stacked up under the fluorescent lights in the dairy aisle at the Shop ‘n Save. Vanilla, peach, lemon-lime, whipped, fat-free, and extra creamy. All made with milk. No soy in sight. She’d left her cell phone in her haste to get out of the house, and she was about to give up and head over to the teeming customer service desk when she saw the abandoned shopping cart.

There were all sorts of healthy things inside – fruits and vegetables, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a few bottles of seltzer water and, sitting right on top, a six-pack of strawberry soy yogurt.

She took a glance around, but there was no one in sight. She’d never had a problem making quick decisions. She’d already wasted almost half an hour and, after all, this customer clearly  _already_  knew where the soy yogurt was located. It’s not like they couldn’t go find a replacement.

She very innocently sidled over to the cart and, in one smooth motion, reached in and plucked the yogurt off the top of the pile.

“I see you’ve added thievery to your repertoire,” a deep voice behind her said. “Really, there was no place else for you to go _but_  petty crime.”

She’d never known how  _awful_  a blush could feel until that moment. The heat started somewhere in the center of her stomach and spread to every inch of skin until she was ready to burst into flames. Really, she was pretty sure her toes were blushing. Because every instinct, every memory in her head, was telling her that she’d just nicked soy yogurt from Logan Echolls’ shopping cart.

She considered bolting. She considered pretending to not know who he was. She considered a lot of attractive and thoroughly ridiculous options, but in the end, there was no choice but to turn around and face him.

“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I was trying to find the soy yogurt, and I saw you had it in your cart, and - ” He raised his eyebrows, patient and amused, and she guiltily set the yogurt back down.

“Those soy products  _can_  be slippery,” he said easily.

Forget dying mothers and getting fired. This – this right here –  _this_  was the worst moment of her life. “Definitely,” she said, strangled.

“Non-dairy,” he confided. “Health food aisle.”

“Oh,” she said faintly.

She was pretty sure her face was almost purple with mortification by now. He, on the other hand, looked irritatingly unruffled, like he’d woken up today expecting to run into his ex-girlfriend lifting yogurt from his shopping cart. Now  _that_ was annoying. Of all the ways she’d envisioned running into Logan Echolls again, floundering around for one-sentence answers under his raised eyebrows was not one of them.

“How are you, Veronica?” he asked.

She might as well be honest; she had no dignity to lose at this point. “Oh, you know – embarrassed,” she said, with as much carelessness as she could muster, given the situation.

“I wouldn’t worry,” he advised her. “On the list of bizarre things I’ve seen you do, this one doesn’t even make the top ten.” She felt her shoulders un-knot a little.

“I’m sorry,” she offered again, and he waved her apology off.

“I’m much less shocked to see you stealing my groceries than I am to see you in Neptune at all,” he pointed out. “I didn’t realize you still came to visit.”

She hesitated. “I don’t,” she said with difficulty. “This is the first time I’ve been back in years.” Five years, to be precise. The exact amount of time since their final break-up. But she wasn’t about to open that can of worms.

“But my dad’s still here,” she pushed on brightly. “I can’t expect him to fly to New York all the time, right?”

She had a sinking suspicion that her glib explanation wasn’t fooling him for one second, but all he said was, “Right.”

Silence.

He had a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread in his hands, and he took the moment to toss it into his cart. And that’s when it hit her.

“Wait,” she said abruptly. “This is  _your_  cart?”

He raised an eyebrow. “It would be kind of cruel to accuse you of stealing from me if it wasn’t.”

“It’s just so…healthy,” she said doubtfully. “I mean…soy yogurt?”

“What did you think I ate?” he asked, amused all over again.

“Beer,” she said bluntly, and he laughed.

God, she’d forgotten how magnetic he could be when he looked like that. He was leaning against the nearest shelf, all lean lines and careless grace, caressing brown eyes and disarming smile. Yep, he definitely had movie star genes. Draped in a t-shirt and jeans, he barely looked like he’d aged. He was still disturbingly attractive, and she suddenly realized what she was doing. She was standing in the middle of the dairy aisle, smiling goofily at Logan Echolls, and remembering a little too vividly what it felt like to have all that sexual energy focused on her.

He broke the moment first, looking down, and it jolted her back into the fluorescent lights and faint music of the supermarket. “I should probably go,” she said a little too quickly. “My family will think I jumped on the next plane back to New York.”

“Right,” he said, a curious flatness to his voice. “I take it you won’t be here long, then.”

 _Until my mother dies_ , she thought. “Not long,” she said.

“So I guess I won’t be seeing you,” he continued, not looking at her. There was something in his voice that she told herself was absolutely  _not_  disappointment. Because she and Logan Echolls had finished disappointing each other years ago. That hollow feeling in her own stomach had to be something else entirely.

“Probably not,” she said, forcing an airy tone. It was amazing she could manage it, when her heart felt like lead.

He gave a bracing little nod. “Okay. Well…good to see you, Veronica.”

“You too,” she said softly, and was shocked by how much she meant it.

He looked like he wanted to speak again, but instead he lifted the yogurt out of his cart and lightly tossed it to her. She caught it, surprised. “Keep it,” he said with a rueful smile. “Parting gift.”

She could only nod as he turned around and started pushing his cart away from her. He only made it three steps, though, before he turned back around.

“I’m having lunch,” he said carelessly. “If you’re hungry.”

She did the mental math in her head. One dying mother plus one unjust firing plus one sound cuckolding all add up to one vulnerable Veronica. One vulnerable Veronica plus one unpredictable high school flame equals one potential disaster.

But he was doing his forced-casual thing; shuffling his feet, pretending to read food labels, fiddling with the sleeves of his shirt, and she suddenly couldn’t bear to say no. This visit was all about closure, right? And Logan was basically a dangling rope of unfinished issues. It wasn’t like he could throw anything at her that she hadn’t seen yet.

She smiled tentatively. “Okay.”

~

“So, how’s your love life?” he asked, and she almost choked on her sandwich.

When he’d invited her for lunch, she’d expected salad and sirloin, New York style. One light course and a glass of wine, an hour of chit-chit chat and out the door. At the very least she’d expected some sort of elaborate creation from Logan’s hired chef, complete with toothpick garnish.

Instead, she got peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread. “Are you serious?” she’d asked him, when he’d set out the plastic jars on the gleaming marble counter of his enormous kitchen.

He’d shrugged. “It’s all I know how to make. Grape jelly, or strawberry?”

“The  _only_  thing? That’s sad.”

He’d smirked and opened his fridge for her to see. “Last I remember you weren’t particularly gifted in the culinary arts yourself. But if you’ve learned to cook in the last five years, feel free to show me up, Mars.”

So they’d ended up eating PB&J on stools in the middle of the kitchen, and, apparently they’d tacitly decided to broach the topic of love lives as well. She reached inside of herself for her stock polite answer:  _Fine, everything’s great, dating in New York is a blast, I may never settle down!_

Instead, what came out was, “My boyfriend of two years just broke up with me. He’d been cheating on me.”

“Well,” he said, without missing a beat, “you really should have seen that coming.”

She gaped. “What?”

He looked at her, surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we’d reached the brutal honesty portion of the conversation.”

She couldn’t seem to close her mouth. The sound that came out of her throat was half-laugh, half-choke. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.”

His eyes were glinting at her. “Wow, you’re out of practice at this. New York must not be much of an intellectual hot bed if you can’t even find a decent sparring partner.”

She was too busy floundering from his first remark to even deal with his second. “I’m serious, Logan. What the hell did you mean by that?”

He sighed and leaned forward a bit. “Veronica,” he said, very gently, “you don’t trust people. If you treat everyone in your life like they’re going to let you down, eventually they will.” She looked for the smirk, for the little signs that said he was just saying these things to bait her. But his changeable gaze was utterly open, and a little sad.

She had to forcibly relax every muscle in her body before she could speak again. “I was completely faithful to him for  _two years_ ,” she gritted out. “You don’t think that counts?”

He shrugged. “I have no doubt you didn’t cheat. That’s not the same as being faithful.”

She clenched her teeth. “Enlighten me.” Her stomach was beginning to knot in an unpleasant and entirely familiar way.

“Actual faith takes trust,” he said sharply, and she got her first hint that he wasn’t completely unaffected by this conversation. “I know you, and you’ve never trusted anyone in your life.”

“It’s not like you’ve done much better for yourself,” she bit out. “Unless you’re hiding a happy family somewhere that I can’t see.” He winced, and the knot in her stomach pulled a little tighter. But she was too far gone to stop her mouth now.

“And another thing,” she said, her voice beginning to shake with anger. “Don’t try and project our problems onto every other relationship in my life. You haven’t seen me for  _five years_. You don’t know what I’ve done or how I’ve grown or anything about me. Just because I could never trust  _you_ \- ”

She stopped short, breathing hard. His face had gone slack. She put a palm against her forehead and pressed, trying to stave off the massive headache she could feel approaching. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean that.” He was still looking at her with that ridiculous puppy dog expression.

“You know what?” she muttered, grabbing her purse. “This was a bad idea.” She started to slide off the bar stool, but he grabbed her wrist, long fingers swallowing up the bones and flesh. It was the first time he’d touched her, and she froze.

“Don’t,” he said, and his eyes were pleading. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to start something. Let’s just,” he blew out all his air. “Let’s try and behave, all right? It’s been five years. I want to know about your life, Veronica.”

“Why?” she said flatly.

He took a few seconds to answer, and she got the feeling he was scrabbling for an acceptable answer. Finally, he settled on a vague, “My life has been…different lately. I just…I’m curious, all right? Can we just try this again? Please?”

Her headache wasn’t going anywhere, and his fingers were still wrapped around her wrist. She did a quick recap of all the reasons she should not stay in this house. They couldn’t spend more than five minutes together without fighting. Together, they probably had more baggage than the entire freshman class of her college combined. Nothing good would come of it. Despite five years and thousands of miles of distance, she still dreamed of him sometimes, and the expression he had on his face right now, sharp and soulful and invasive. Searching and hopeful. Compelling, and entirely too dangerous.

Very slowly, she slid back onto her stool, and she saw his shoulders relax. “Only because you said ‘please’,” she conceded evenly, and he smiled. He opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. “But can we not talk about this? Let’s try something else, okay?” He looked at her for an odd, still moment, then seemed to decide something, and closed his mouth. Smart man.

“Okay,” he said.

The silence that followed was anything but comfortable. She looked at the clock on the microwave, the geometric pattern on the tiles, the hideous aquatic bronze sculpture sitting in the middle of his kitchen table.

She felt him nudge her shoulder. “Come on,” he said, smiling gently. “It’s time for the special homeowner’s tour.”

“Let me guess,” she asked half-heartedly. “Extra time in the bedroom?”

That put the smirk right back on his face. “Getting the hang of the banter thing again,” he said. “Nice. A few more days and you’ll be tearing me to shreds. Just like old times.”

She actually laughed as she followed him out of the kitchen.

~

It took almost an hour to make it through Logan’s house. He’d always said he wanted a small place, something that didn’t remind him of his parents and his childhood, but his current abode had thirty rooms. Thirty. She thought of her one-bedroom apartment in the city, and how she could barely keep track of her car keys in her limited amount of space. It was a lot of room for one person; too much, she decided, and she told him so, when they finally sat down to rest in the largest of his three living rooms.

He touched the sharp edge of the coffee table. “Yeah,” he said softly. “It probably is.”

“You could always move back into the Grand,” she suggested pertly. “I heard they retired the Logan Echolls Suite.”

He smiled a bit painfully. “Believe it or not, my masochistic streak has actually diminished over the years. I’d rather not deal with any place associated with my father.”

 _Shit_. “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I didn’t think. That was stupid.”

He shrugged it off, like always. “It’s been over for a long time,” he said, grave and resigned, and he sounded so adult that she wanted to pinch herself, to make sure she hadn’t entered an alternate universe.

She told him about getting fired; he told her all about Trina convincing him to invest in her nightclub, and how it had turned into a career.

She narrowed her eyes. “Let me get this straight: you own the whole club, and you’ve  _never seen it_?”

“Five clubs, actually.”

“So…who runs them?”

“The people I hire to run them.”

“And then you live off the profits.”

“Right.”

She put her hands flat on the table and leveled her gaze at him. “So what you’re really saying is that you’re getting paid for having money in the first place.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “I don’t think anyone’s ever put it quite like that, but…yeah, that’s about it.”

She shook her head in disgust. “Rich kids.”

He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. She knew what was coming an instant before he opened his mouth.

He tipped his head to the side. “Why are you really here, Veronica?” he said, genuine curiosity in his voice. “Somehow I doubt you missed Neptune.”

She almost didn’t answer. There was no reason on earth to tell him. She’d be gone in a few days, and he hadn’t been privy to her secrets in years. But for some reason, she wanted him to know. There was a certain gravity mixed in with the smugness in his eyes that had never been there before. A softness that said he’d suffered, too, without her there to see it, or help him through it. He’d had plenty of faults when they were dating, but he’d never, ever used her personal tragedies against her; with this, she trusted him.

“My mother’s dying,” she said, and for once the words came out clearly, went right from her mouth to his ears without struggle.

He reacted without reacting. He didn’t move a muscle, but the look in his eyes said he was a hair’s breath from…something. From touching her, maybe. She saw him swallow once, take a deep breath.

“I, uh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know, I mean, I didn’t think you two were – ”

“We’re not,” she said, cutting off his fumbling speech. “But my father wanted me to come, so I’m here.” It was easy to tell him, really. It was the sweetest and cleanest she’d felt since her father had broken the news.

He searched her face for a few weighted seconds, and it hit her again how old they both were, almost thirty years old in real time, but hundreds of years in experience. He was trying to pick up a signal from her, something to tell him what to do with this particular brand of catastrophe. He’d never been very good at saying the right thing at the right time, but when it was important, he always seemed to come through. Today was no different.

He cleared his throat. “How come you were never that easy to control when we were dating?” he asked roughly, and she laughed. He reached across the table and took her hand, enfolded her small, cold fingers in his own, big and warm and so tender that she felt a piercing longing shoot right through her. “I’m sorry,” he said again, holding her eyes.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

It was all so familiar – his hand and hers, his body and hers, the two of them figuring out a way to keep standing when everything else was falling down around them. She couldn’t help but wonder, for a moment, if  _this_  was the reason she’d been duped and dumped, the reason she hadn’t been able to settle down with anyone, ever. Maybe part of her heart would always be shaped like his smile, would always be reserved in case she needed to help keep him standing. Maybe part of her would always reach out to him to keep her standing as well. She reminded herself of the equation again. One vulnerable Veronica plus one smiling Logan equals one big painful mess. But she couldn’t feel anything but happy that he was here, and that he still seemed to have some of himself reserved for her, too.

The room was starting to deepen with shadows when she turned to find him smiling softly at her. “What?” she asked, even though she knew.

That look was trouble. That look meant soft sheets and skin sliding against skin, heat and friction and that breathy little moan that only he had ever been able to pull out of her. That look was the reason she shouldn’t be here, the reason she should have turned and ran the second he invited her to lunch.

That look was the reason she still wasn’t running.

“Nothing,” he shrugged, still smiling. “It’s just – it’s good to see you. I never thought you’d be back here.”

“That makes two of us,” she said, forcing a dry tone. “I still can’t believe we’re sitting down, catching up like real adults.

He turned serious in the space of a second. “I can believe it,” he said, very intently, and she felt the impact of his gaze shiver all up and down her spine. Warning signals were going off all over her brain, but she didn’t have a prayer of walking away now. He must have seen something in her face, because he looked down suddenly, a wry twist to his lips.

“I don’t know,” he said, running his hands back and forth along the table’s edge like he was searching out some sort of message. There were so many memories locked up in his hands that she had to look away. “I just-” he said abruptly, shifting impatiently in his seat, “I just always assumed there was another chance coming. For us. I didn’t know it was the last time, until…” the words stopped, but the struggle in his eyes didn’t.

“Until…” she said, coiled tightly. She was almost certain she didn’t want to hear this, but she was even more certain she’d never sleep again until she did.

“Until you left,” he said with a small smile, and despite all the warning signals she felt like she’d been sucker punched. There wasn’t enough air in the room for her to deal with his meaningful glances and too-late confessions. There wasn’t enough air for the two of them to share here, and she was suddenly suffocating, drowning right next to him on dry land.

“I knew, then, that it was over,” he said. “But I just - ” His eyes were all over her face, and it wasn’t doing anything to help with the whole breathing situation. “I wish I had known,” he said quietly. “I know it wouldn’t have changed anything, to try and convince you to stay, but…” he finally looked away. “I still wish it.”

“It would have changed things,” she said roughly, without meaning to. “If you had called then, it – it would have changed things.”

He stared at her for a painful, shell-shocked moment, and it ran through her in one instant, all the paths their futures could have taken if life and history and their own stupid tendencies hadn’t kept getting in the way. She felt light-headed, and she was pretty sure that if she didn’t do something, speak or move or drag her eyes away from his face, she’d have about ten seconds before her mouth was on his and they were using each other for oxygen.

He saved her. He laughed the moment off, short and rueful, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to loosen.

“I guess it all ended well anyway, right?” There was the barest hint of a question in his voice. She thought about her failed relationship and her career in tatters, her dying mother and her disappointed family, and how there was nothing waiting for her back in New York.

“Yeah,” she forced out. “Sure.”

“Right,” he said again, still watching her with that unnerving intensity.

It hit her again, in one blinding moment of clarity, how risky this was, how dangerous and stupid. She stood up so abruptly that she saw stars. “I should, I have to- to go. Alicia’s waiting,” she fumbled.

He stood with her. “No, of course. You should go.”

She didn’t want to leave. She resisted the urge to drag her feet as he walked her to the foyer. There was a faintly resigned look to his brown eyes that struck a chord of memory so deep in her she’d forgotten she’d buried it. It was the look he’d given her when her father kicked him out of their apartment the first time, a last backwards glance before he was shoved through the door. The look he’d given her when he walked out on his own power months later, after he’d held her and cried with her and watched a classmate jump off a building with her. Like he’d known it was coming, but hadn’t been able to stop it from hurting anyway.

“Bye.” Her voice felt like sandpaper. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, brief and final, and that was all it took. His lips on her skin, and she was kissing him, kissing him for real, with lips and teeth and hot mingling breath. Her hands on his face and his arms around her back and nothing but scant layers of cloth and fifteen years of history between them.

Then she was gone, running down the steps with her heart slamming against her rib cage and his scent marking her.

~

She steered clear of public places after that. Unfortunately, privacy came at a premium in Neptune. There were exactly two places she could go without being seen or approached: her room and her father’s office. Her room had grown sparser and emptier as the years passed. Now there was nothing left except a few paperbacks she’d never gotten around to reading and the laptop she’d brought from New York. Enough to keep her entertained for about, oh, twenty minutes. She spent an entire morning attempting to help out in the Mars Investigations office, but she hadn’t worked in the detective business in years. She’d found herself more in the way than anything else, and after a few hours of uselessly sifting through files, her father had shooed her out the door in exasperation.

That left the hospital. The first time she went back, she didn’t even make it through the front doors. The second time she made it all the way into her mother’s room, only to find her sleeping, every painful breath sounding in the quiet room.  
   
“Go ahead,” the nurse said, smiling at her. “You can wake her. She’s been sleeping most of the day.” She’d tried to reach out and touch her, shake her awake, but she was trembling too violently. She found herself outside on the concrete walkway within minutes, sucking in air and daylight, trying to just stay conscious. She couldn’t make herself go back in.

“Just do it,” Wallace told her. “Even if you don’t mean it. Just tell her goodbye.”

“I don’t want to do her any favors,” she said. Her voice sounded like a toddler’s, small and cranky, and she wondered what it was about Neptune that reduced her to a scared child.

“I think you’ll be doing yourself a favor,” he said, frustrated. “This is the last chance you’ll have to make peace, Veronica.”

She hated to admit that he was right, but every day that passed made her stomach hurt a little worse. She would try anything, to make that go away.

“Maybe,” she said softly. “Maybe.”

The third time she went to the hospital, she just sat and watched her mother sleep. She couldn’t talk to her. She  _couldn’t_. She wrote four different versions of notes to leave on the bedside table. She even ended one with “Love, Veronica.” But the one she finally settled on said: “Came to see you. Didn’t want to wake you. Be back tomorrow. Veronica.”

~

Twenty-four hours later, Lianne was dead. It was sooner than Veronica had been expecting, than anyone had been expecting. They’d all thought they had a few more weeks, but Lianne had taken a turn for the worse – quietly, without complaint – and died alone in the middle of the night. She’d signed the DNR papers, according to the hospital, so the nurses had let her flatline without calling for help.

Veronica knew, just from the look on her father’s face, exactly what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth. It didn’t stop the words from hitting her like a punch to the gut when he finally said them.

Her mother had abandoned them. She’d lied and she’d slept around and she hadn’t been able to give up drinking for her family when her daughter had given up everything – everything – for her.

And she’d died alone, unforgiven, and in pain.

It was all Veronica’s vengeful wishes come to life, and she couldn’t even enjoy it, because her mother was dead, and it felt worse than Veronica could have even imagined. It was an aching sort of emptiness, to know her mother was going to be buried in the ground and never speak or smile again. If this was what closure felt like, Veronica decided she could do without.

She didn’t cry. She turned away from her father and went back to checking her email.

~

The day of Lianne’s funeral was gorgeous, bright and breezy and warm, all blue skies and fluffy clouds and perfect, rustling trees. It was the kind of day for putting guilt behind you, for shrugging off burdens and turning over new leaves. Her father certainly looked lighter already. The circles under his eyes seemed less dire this morning, and he swung Alicia’s hand like they were twenty years old and in love instead of pushing sixty and struggling to get by in a town that was quickly outgrowing them.

And Veronica’s mother was about to be put in the ground, where she would rot, like Lilly, and Lynn and Aaron, and all the other people she’d already watched die. That band of taffy was stretching in her stomach again, gut to throat, and she wished it would just snap already.

She didn’t care, she told herself. Lianne had been a crappy mother and a crappy wife and she might as well have been dead for years, for all the effect it had on Veronica. She didn’t care that she was gone for good, and she didn’t care that she’d never really forgiven her, and she was numb, and detached, and so very, very over it, and….

She barely made it to the bushes before she threw up. Her father was there a second later, a hand on her shoulder as she wiped her mouth and her stomach heaved.

“I’m fine,” she told him, through the hollow nausea in her throat.

She could see all the possible answers in her father’s eyes, all the assurances and offers of help – a shoulder to lean on, a set of ears to help her through this. And she could see that he was already through it. Somehow, he’d come to terms when she wasn’t looking. The worst thing she saw there was pity, because she’d had a chance to make things right, and she hadn’t taken it.

“I’m fine,” she said again, before he could speak. She got up, kept stumbling toward her car, away from his acceptance and his peace.

~

The band broke. She found herself on Logan’s property that night without any memory of driving there. If her life were a movie, the heavens would be dumping rain and the wind would be howling, and she would show up on his doorstep like a lost kitten, drenched and shivering, and he would pull her through the door and kiss her until she was warm again.

But her life wasn’t nearly so glamorous. The night was clear and beautiful, and she couldn’t show up on Logan’s doorstep without warning, because he had a gated property and a multi-million dollar security system in place to prevent people from doing exactly that.

He sounded annoyed when he answered her intercom buzz. “If you’re here for another sandwich and makeout session, I’m going to have to start charging,” his voice said through the static.

She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“Veronica?”

She started to cry.

“Jesus,” she heard. The gates opened a second later, and she drove down his endless driveway, trying to wipe the tears away so she didn’t drive right onto his lawn.

He was waiting at the door for her, naked concern on his face. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is it – oomph!” He broke off when she threw herself at him, attacked him with her mouth and her hands and her legs wrapped around his waist. He caught her, of course, plastered her against him, because he really didn’t have another choice, the way she was kissing him.

He kissed her back like they hadn’t spent five years apart, his big body flexing and tightening under her, and she was suddenly beyond aroused, beyond desperate for him. He made a few valiant tries.

“Veronica,” he groaned, as she placed little kisses all along his jaw. She was still crying. “Slow down, let’s talk about – ” But she rolled her hips against him once, and the rest of his words turned into a hiss of pleasure.

Then later, when she’d already stripped off her shirt and they were halfway to his bed: “This isn’t healthy. Seriously, we have to talk before we just…” By the time he forced out the last word of the sentence, he was flat on his back; her mouth was on the salty skin of his stomach and his hands were on her head, pulling her closer, even as he was telling her to stop.

Finally, when she had her fingers wrapped around the hard length of him, guiding him into her, she heard the soft plea, “I don’t want you to regret this later.”

She couldn’t promise him anything, and she knew it. She should stop and talk, like he’d wanted to from the beginning, but she couldn’t do that either. The only thing she wanted was his skin and his mouth and his body inside of hers, and so she arched up, pulled him against her, as deep inside of her as he could possibly be.

She didn’t try to reassure him, and he didn’t try to comfort her. She didn’t say anything except for his name, once, when she came, and he kissed the tears from her cheeks and let the salt dry on his own lips.

~

Veronica always assumed one-night stands with strangers were the most awkward things in the world, which was why she made it a point to never have them. She was wrong. The most awkward thing in the world was a one-night stand with your estranged ex-boyfriend, who had just let you use him for comfort sex. She rolled over in the morning to find him watching her. His expression went guarded the minute they locked eyes.

“My mother’s funeral was yesterday,” she said without preamble, voice still raspy from sleep and tears.  _Well done, Veronica. Way to ease the tension._

But he just brushed some hair out of her eyes and said, “I figured.”

She had to smile. “What gave it away?”

“Your outfit,” he said. “You never wear black.”

He rolled out of bed, strong and easy and gorgeous, and she felt the tears well up in her eyes again for no reason. “I’ll make coffee,” he said, without a hint of expression in his voice, and she wasn’t sure if he was pissed, or sad, or anything at all.

She stared at herself for a long time in his bathroom mirror. The room was simple; no solid-gold trim, no crystal chandeliers. She could see her discarded funeral clothing lying in a heap by his bed. Well, most of it. Her shirt was still somewhere in his foyer. She put on his bathrobe instead – blue, silk, and perfect against her skin. For some reason she was suddenly convinced it was the best thing she’d ever worn. She followed the faint noises into the kitchen.

He looked like a walking Hanes ad in his T-shirt and boxers, all stubble, messy hair, and languid movements. He went still when he saw her, the coffee pot hovering in mid-air between the counter and percolator.  “I borrowed your robe,” she said shyly. He didn’t answer her, but she saw his knuckles go white on the handle, and she had the sudden feeling she had missed something very, very important.

He set the coffee pot back on the burner in a careful, controlled motion, before turning to face her completely. “We have to talk,” he said, face inscrutable. Yes, she was definitely missing something. Her stomach began to flutter, and not in the good way.

“Wow, a little soon to jump into the relationship talks,” she tried to joke. “I thought I was supposed to be the girl, here.” His entire body winced. “Kidding,” she said weakly. His expression didn’t soften, and she didn’t like this one bit. She crossed her arms to stop them from shaking, suddenly achingly aware of how naked she was under the robe.

“Veronica,” he said gently. “I’m engaged.”

It was interesting, she’d think later, how peaceful things always got before they went to hell again. Her father always said it was life’s way of letting you breathe. She was pretty sure it was life’s way of making sure you never saw it coming.

One confession, and the whole room seemed to bottom out under her. Walls pressing in, vision wavering, body going numb. “What,” she whispered.

“I have a fiancée,” he said, again, in case she misunderstood the first time. His voice was low and controlled, but she could see his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

She wanted to say something else; she really did. But she was suddenly choking – on the silence, on his strained face, on the fact that his stupid robe was still blanketing her skin. He took a step toward her and she scrambled back against the counter. He stopped, caught in mid-reach for her.

“I need you to not touch me right now,” she said hoarsely.

He barely nodded; his eyes were on her frozen expression. “I’m sorry,” he said miserably. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you. First you said you didn’t want to talk about it, then last night you were so upset…” He trailed off at the look on her face.

“So it’s  _my_  fault?” she barked with a hysterical half-laugh. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

“God, were you  _ever_  going to tell me?” she yelled. “Did you think you were doing me a  _favor_  by doling out a pity fuck when you were engaged?”

“Don’t do that,” he said sharply. “You know it wasn’t like that.”

“Then what?” she cried. “Or did I miss the part where you were planning to leave her, due to the deep,  _meaningful_  roll in the hay we just had?”

He slumped against the counter, hands moving restlessly in his hair. “I love her,” he said helplessly, and she realized that she’d never actually known what it felt like to have your heart ripped from top to bottom, every painful, grasping inch. All the practice in the world couldn’t prepare you for the real thing. It took her a full thirty seconds before she could speak again.

“I’m sure,” she said, voice wobbling. “Is this how you always show your love? By sleeping with ex-girlfriends?”

His mouth drew into a tight line, despite the torture in his eyes. “No. Only you. Apparently I’ve still got some of that masochistic streak left after all.”

“Oh  _excuse_  me,” she said, nearly blind with anger. “I’m so  _sorry_  for being difficult. Please, what can I possibly do to make this more comfortable for  _you_?”

“You can stop being a bitch and listen,” he snapped.

The anger dropped from his face the second he met her eyes. “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry, Veronica.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know how else to say it. I swear, the last thing I wanted to do was dump more shit on top of you right now.” He looked at her, all tormented brown eyes and drawn face, and it took superhuman strength to keep from breaking down right there.

She bit down on her lip until she tasted blood. “Tell me how to act, here, Logan,” she said, voice trembling. “I don’t know what to say. What did you expect?”

“I didn’t expect anything,” he said, and there was a fifteen-year-old bitterness in his words. “I assumed it was a one-night thing. That you needed someone, and you’d be gone in the morning. That’s how it usually works with us, right?”

“Then why did you sleep with me?” she whispered, raw and scratched.

“I missed you too much to say no,” he said simply, without defense, and that was all it took to crack what was left of her composure.

“God, Logan,” she choked out. It hit her in a rush. There wouldn’t be any more chances for them, any more beginnings. He wasn’t her ex-boyfriend anymore – he was someone else’s future husband. The love of someone else’s life. Not her safe place. Not hers at all. “I have to go,” she muttered. “I have to get out of here.”

He took a step toward her, and she jerked away again, tripping back toward the bedroom. “Slow down,” he said, harried. “You’re upset. Let me drive - ”

“No!” she said. “Just- I can’t be here right now.”

He trailed anxiously behind her as she grabbed her clothes. “I know you’re pissed, but if you’ll let me- ”

She was throwing open the front door before he could finish the sentence. “Veronica!” he called, as she raced down his front steps for the second time that week. He was still framed in the doorway as she drove away.

Her father was sitting at the kitchen counter when she stumbled in, still wearing her clothes from the day before. He rose when he saw her, took one look at her face, and pulled her into a hug. He was murmuring things to her, trying to figure out what was wrong, but all she could do was shake her head and weep into the front of his shirt.

“Okay,” he said finally, gently. “It’s okay. Just cry.”

~

There were some things that Veronica would never forget about Neptune. The shiny SUV’s lining Main Street on a Saturday afternoon. The names of the streets you shouldn’t travel after dark. The palm-decorated skyline of the PCH highway, and the back roads to Dog Beach.

She met Wallace there the Thursday after her mother’s funeral. She requested he leave his wife and kids at home, and he seemed to understand. They spread out a blanket and sat looking at the ocean. It was still early spring, but it was California, after all, and there were already girls lying out in bikinis and stay-at-home moms under umbrellas with their infants. The newest generation of the PCH bike club came and went in the parking lot, and she made a mental note to ask her father about Weevil.

The thing about Wallace was that he let her talk and talk and talk, and he didn’t ask questions that hurt her, and he didn’t call her on being self-absorbed, and he never ever tried to give her advice. He let her talk about her mother, and about Logan, and he sat and listened and hurled rocks toward the water.

“I know it’s stupid,” she said softly, “and selfish, but I never thought he’d end up with someone else. I thought he’d always be sort of…mine.”

Wallace pulled her in close, so she could lean against his shoulder. “You know you’ll always have me, right?” he whispered above the waves. For once the promise didn’t bounce right off her. Her brain grabbed madly at his words, and she was terrified by how much she wanted to believe him.

~

She didn’t think she’d see Logan again, but he came to visit her a week after she put her mother in the ground. Her father let him in, then knocked on her bedroom door to tell her she had a “gentleman caller,” like she had never left high school.

“How are you?” he asked carefully, when they were seated across from each other, untouched coffee mugs in hand. She wanted to say something cutting, but if he could be an adult, then so could she.

“Fine,” she said coolly. “Cheat on your fiancée much lately?”

Okay, maybe not.

She saw the little muscle start to twitch in his jaw. “I think I liked it better when you were out of practice with the sarcasm,” he said grimly.

“Well you can’t have it both ways,” she retorted.

That sobered him right up. “I know,” he said on an exhale. “I know.”

He looked beaten, and guilt-ridden; he looked as though he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, and she found herself having to consciously side-step the urge to comfort him. If anyone deserved comfort right now, it was her. Or his poor, nameless fiancée. “Let’s just get this over with, Logan,” she said shortly. “Have you told her yet?”

“No, she’s uh – she’s away for a couple weeks, visiting her family in San Francisco.” He was rubbing his palms in agitation over the coarse fabric of the couch. “I didn’t think she’d appreciate hearing it over the phone.”

She couldn’t argue with that piece of logic, although she really wanted to. “Are you going to tell her?” she asked, hearing the steel creep into her voice. Her fingers were very cold, and she realized abruptly they were curled so tightly over the edge of the cushion that she’d lost circulation.

His voice was scratchy with exhaustion and strain when he said, “I can’t lie to her. Not about this. And I can’t tell her. I can’t hurt her like that.” He looked at her, tortured. “And I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have. I don’t know how to fix this Veronica. Tell me what to do. Do I tell her?”

Her spine snapped to attention. “Oh no,” she said angrily. “You do  _not_  get to put this on me, Logan. You made this mess – you have to deal with it.”

He hung his head, defeated, and they sat in the heavy silence for a few seconds. She almost certainly didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking the question anyway. “If you tell her, do you…do you think she’ll forgive you?”

His laugh sounded quite hollow. “Forgive me? No. I don’t think she’ll forgive me. I think she’ll dump me so fast my head will spin around. You’d like her.”

“I’m sure we’d be shopping buddies in no time,” she muttered.

He turned his head to stare at her, and his eyes were haunted. “She’s blonde,” he said slowly. “And tiny, and prickly, and way too good for me.”

Jealousy shot through her fast enough to give her whiplash. “You have the worst timing ever,” she informed him angrily. “And if you think I want to hear this, you’re insane.”

He steamrolled over her like she hadn’t even spoken. “If I tell her what happened, I’ll break her heart. I swear to God Veronica, I don’t want to do that.”

She had to shove her teeth together to stop the trembling. “Because you love her,” she said with effort.

“Yes,” he said painfully. “Almost as much as I love you.” He must have seen the shock on her face, because he gave a strangled laugh and looked away. “Don’t look like that,” he said in a low voice. “You know it’s true, Veronica. I always have.”

She wondered if this was what her mother had felt like, when Jake Kane married someone else. She wondered if her mother had felt this way until the day she died; like she was breathing through a very narrow tube. Just enough air to stay conscious. Certainly not enough to move forward. Definitely not enough to thrive.

“So I guess it’s settled then,” she said unevenly, knowing the answer. Tears were threatening again and she dug her nails slowly into her palms, bracing herself.

Only, he didn’t say what she expected. He was quiet for a long moment. His eyes were still turbulent, but his voice was steady when he said, “That depends on you.”

She went very still. “What?”

“You said before that you were going back to New York. Are you still going?” he asked her with controlled calm.

Her heart rate was beginning to do funny things. “Do you want me to go?”

“I don’t want you to go because of me,” he said, his gaze piercing right through her. “Not because of this.”

She had to speak very, very carefully now, to make sure they understood each other. “I could never stay here and act like everything is okay after this,” she told him, watching his eyes, trying to latch on to the shifting emotion there.

He brushed a hand along her cheek, and she shivered with the tenderness of it. “I know,” he murmured.

“So…what?” she asked faintly. She could feel awful, dangerous hope start to rise in her.

“You could leave,” he said, his voice dragging out of him like wet gravel, “and it can stay a secret. You’ll be gone, and she’ll never have to know. She’ll never have to get hurt like that.” He slid his fingers through hers, and in her mind she heard him telling her he didn’t know their last time would be their last time until it was too late. “Or I can tell her now,” he said carefully, “and you…you could stay.”

His eyes were burning into hers, and she couldn’t have looked away if she tried. “Veronica, when you left the first time, I barely survived. And I don’t -” his voice cracked, just a little, “I don’t want you to leave again. Not if you don’t want to.” She should say something, she knew, but she was afraid to break the moment. She couldn’t predict which way it would shatter.

“If you stay – if she finds out what happened…” he said thickly. “It’s up to you,” he continued, holding her eyes. “What do I do, Veronica? Do I tell her?” She tried to pull her hand out of his, mind whirling, but he squeezed tight. His other hand was stroking her cheek a little – small, reverent caresses. He was asking her a question, and she wasn’t even sure he knew what he wanted the answer to be.

“Do I tell her?” he asked again, quiet and desperate.

And suddenly she saw: if she said yes, he would do it. He would break off his engagement, because she was here, and she wanted him to. He would kiss her now, and tell her in that husky, shuddering voice how much he loved her, and then they would go back to his king-sized bed and make love and laugh and cry and smile at each other until their cheeks ached. She could see it all playing out frame by frame in her head, a perfect playbook of what could be. She knew this story; she’d lived this story. She thought of all the times they’d been here before, all the times they’d caught each other when the other was falling. Of how much alike they were. Of how well they made love and how well they fought. How well they tore each other down. She thought of how spectacularly it always fell apart, of how much it always hurt, and how they’d been chasing after closure for fifteen years without success. Of how miserable they always ended up, and how close he was to escaping it all, to getting out. To maybe being happy.

And she made the right decision. “No,” she whispered through the tears in her throat. “You don’t tell her.”

He swallowed slowly. He took a moment to collect himself, the struggle plain as day on his face. And then he squeezed her hand once and let her go. “Okay,” he said, and she tried very hard not to hear the relief in his voice, and the grief.

They looked at each other for a few seconds; then he wrapped his arms around her, and she did her best not to press her face against his chest. “I’m still going to miss you,” he said softly into her hair, a little bit of despair in his voice.

She wanted to tell him she was going to miss him, too, and that she was glad he’d found a way to have some peace, even if it was with someone else, but she didn’t want him to see her cry again. A million things went through her mind, but the only one she could manage to get out was, “I can’t believe you actually grew up.”

He looked at her for a long, surprised moment, and there was a devastating sort of affection in his eyes when he said, “I can’t believe you actually noticed.”

~

Lilly Kane’s grave was located on the opposite side of the cemetery from Veronica’s mother. Even the dead were segregated by wealth in Neptune, and the Kane family had secured prime real estate for their little girl. Dappled by tree branches and backed by an extensive garden, the rose-hued stone drew eyes as easily as the girl herself had done. Veronica sat down on the accompanying bench for the first time in five years, feeling the nostalgia well up in her.

“Hey Lilly,” she said softly. The day was perfect and sunny and made for being out-of-doors, and it made her never want to set foot on the East Coast again. “I’m almost thirty, Lilly,” she continued. She shook her head. “I still feel sixteen.”

She tried to imagine Lilly’s arch smile, tried to imagine what she would say if she were alive, how she would scold Veronica for sitting around in a graveyard, moping about a  _boy_. But it wasn’t working. Because Lilly would be thirty, too, now, and maybe she would have been a Neptune trophy wife, or maybe she would have been slogging through the rain forest building houses for poor tribes in South America, or maybe she would have died in some other tragic and completely spectacular way. Maybe she would be married to Logan. Veronica wasn’t sure if she was more devastated or relieved that she’d never have to find out.

“I’m really, really lost right now, Lil,” she said as her tears blurred the spring flowers around her. “I wish you could just be here to tell me what to do.” But Lilly hadn’t answered her in years. She left a picture of the two of them preening at age fourteen, rolled up inside an “I ♥ New York” shot glass in front of the headstone

It took a full twenty minutes for Veronica to walk the twisting tar paths from her best friend’s resting place to her mother’s. Lianne didn’t get quite as swanky a deal – apparently being the town drunk wasn’t on the same level as being the daughter of its favored benefactor. Her mother’s grave was a little more crowded, another flat gray stone among hundreds, lined up in rows in the sun.

There was no bench, so she slid to the ground in front of it. It was the newest grave in the section, she could tell. Her father had inscribed “Wife and Mother” right above her name and dates, and Veronica had to be glad that he hadn’t taken the lie any further and written “loving Mother” or “darling Wife” or, worst of all, “She will be missed.”

She had nothing to say to her mother. She didn’t have any practice talking to this particular ghost. She didn’t want to reminisce and she didn’t want to ask advice and it was a little tough to vent her frustrations when a silent slab of granite was her only audience. Granite didn’t fight back, and she still very much wanted to fight.

So she sat. She thought about how terrible a cook her mother was, even before the vodka took over. She thought about how she had her mother’s blue eyes and blonde hair, and how adoringly her father used to look at her before everything went to hell. She thought about her mother picking boys out of her yearbook and bringing home stray animals and how, even though he would have defended Veronica or Keith to his death, Back-up always really liked Lianne best.

She thought about all the things that she’d forgotten, or discarded along the way, how much she she’d buried and how much she still didn’t understand. And when the shadows started to stretch around her, and Veronica stood up to leave, she leaned over and whispered her forgiveness into cool stone.

She didn’t leave anything except flowers.

~

Logan drove her to the airport. He bought a ticket, despite her raised eyebrows, and walked right through security with her. They slouched next to each other in the hard plastic chairs and attempted to make small talk for all of five minutes before they gave up and stared out at the tarmac.

“I’m not coming to your wedding,” she said without warning, and immediately felt her face flood with color. He just looked amused.

“You assume you were actually getting an invitation,” he teased, and she felt a little less like she wanted to die.

“Okay,” she said, relieved. “Good.”

“Same here,” he added as an afterthought. “When you get married, I don’t want any engraved cards in the mail. And I won’t call you by your married name.”

She had to smile. “We’ll put it on the list of things we won’t talk about,” she agreed.

“We might want to make a list of topics that  _aren’t_  forbidden,” he pointed out. “Much shorter.”

He stood up with her when they called her row to board. And maybe he slid his hands up into her hair and held her a little too tightly when they said goodbye, but they would never talk about that, either.

But there were a few things that still weren’t off-limits. “Logan,” she said softly, right before she turned to go. “I’ll miss you, too.”


End file.
